Some midlife ruminations spice the comic menu in this Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon sequel to “The Trip”

If Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were even 7 percent less amusing, "The Trip to Italy" would have no reason to exist, even with its casually gorgeous scenery and shattering close-ups of seafood pasta fresh out of the kitchen.

Like its predecessor, "The Trip" (which opened in the U.S. in 2011), director Michael Winterbottom's comic breeze of a movie was distilled from a longer BBC-TV miniseries. Coogan and Brydon, both born in 1965 and ubiquitous show business figures in England, again play semi-fictional editions of themselves. Once again Brydon has been hired by the Observer to write about a half-dozen restaurants, this time all around Italy, from Rome to Liguria, with stops along the way at the places made famous by Shelley and Byron. The car the boy-men rent is a Mini Cooper, recalling the one Michael Caine drove in "The Italian Job."

Which brings us to the real point of "The Trip to Italy": Michael Caine impressions of the highest order. There's even less interest here than in the first movie in the food, or a plot. The food is simply there to be admired, in brief, tasty cutaway shots. The bulk of the film deals with the ongoing, narcissistic, petty, undermining frenemy-ship between these two performers, both of whom are awfully good at vocal mimicry, with Caine being a particular favorite, though Anthony Hopkins in "The Bounty" isn't far behind.

In "The Trip to Italy" the dueling-Caines bit segues into a rip on both Christian Bale and Tom Hardy and their hilarious near-inaudibility in "The Dark Knight Rises." Elsewhere a candid admission that most sequels fail, with the exception of "The Godfather: Part II," leads Brydon to do Al Pacino, and Coogan to turn critic. Singing along to Alanis Morissette, acknowledging their fears of mortality, the duo are constricted by a mere sliver of narrative. The Brydon character has an affair with a British expat (Rosie Fellner) he meets on the tour, cheating on his unseen wife, who's stuck in dreary London with their preteen daughter. Coogan is given a fictional teenage son (Timothy Leach) who doesn't see his father much and who arrives for a short Italian vacation in the later scenes.

What does this movie tell us about the "real" Brydon and Coogan? To the extent there's truth amid the witty improvisatory illusions here, "The Trip to Italy" is unusually astute in its depiction of male companionship of a deeply competitive sort. Nothing too revealing occurs, though. This is one comedy, light on its feet and proudly navel-gazing, content with skimming the surface, and it's so good at it, the surface is enough. Even the aging-horndog jokes work. Watching a hotel employee stroll by, Coogan notes: "She's got a lovely gait." Brydon's rejoinder: "Probably padlocked."

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"The Trip to Italy" - 3 1/2 stars

No MPAA rating (some language, mostly in Coogan's Robert De Niro impression)